By introducing such a split temporality in the image itself, the ghostly shad-
ows shatter the continuum of history. The image is no longer a preserved mo-
ment of past time. Technology instead inscribes itself to demonstrate how it
conditions the representation of the past and the writing of history. These auto-
chromes are images of the ephemerality of history itself. The stability of the im-
print is broken as it introduces movement into the still image, resulting in an
unidentifiable presence of invisible people in the image. This ephemerality is at
the core of Benjamin’s materialist approach to the concept of history. The auto-
chromes provide the evanescence of the flash of lightning, as the people they
depict have already passed. Their passage is abbreviated in a ghostly moment.
They have, literally, left the picture. These images are haunting pictures of war.
The parading soldiers have passed and gone, impossible to discern as indivi-
duals in the image. They are the ghostly shadows of the sort that Maxim Gorky
had already identified in the moving image upon his visit to the Cinematograph
in,thus eluding a fixed historical signification or an indexical presence in
the image alone.
However, Benjamin’s famous expression of“memory, as it flashes in a mo-
ment of danger”cannot be reduced to the stable, moving images of Kahn’s films
alone. Neither is this dimension to be found in the still photography in the ar-
chive, since these images remain before us at any time, and not only at a mo-
ment of danger. The flash of memory is a matter of montage. As the images of
the Archives of the Planet were not edited together for screening, the archive is
the site of future connections and virtual montage. However, it would, in this
case, be insufficient to understand montage only as the editing of film shots or
the arrangements of still photos. Instead, the historical articulation of the past
depends on the configurations and intersections of media. The role of photogra-
phy and the moving image in Kahn’s archival project is to establish connecting
points with other technologies, media, visibilities and utterances. The centrality
of the media interconnections and gaps is commented upon by Samuel Weber
in relation to Benjamin’s concepts of allegory and aura:
What this meteoric event [of the allegorical that exceeds or eludes signification] leaves
behind in its wake is what I would be tempted to call–if a neologism can be allowed- themediauric: auratic flashes and shadows that are not just produced and repro-
duced by the media but whicharethemselves the media, since they come to pass in
places that are literally inter-mediary, in the interstices of a process of reproduction
and of recording–Aufnahme–that is above all a mass movement of collection and
dispersion, of banding together and of disbanding.
The rupture of the continuum of historical time and the presence of the past in
monstrous abbreviation in the present makes these autochromes of ghostly pro-
cessions in Kahn’s archive intoseductiveimages indeed. The historical articula-
“The Archives of the Planet”and Montage 217